Healed-up Rollins swinging away as of late

Phillies shortstop Jimmy Rollins bats during a game against the Nationals Tuesday. After struggling at the plate due to a badly scraped wrist, Rollins has been hitting well again. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)

PHILADELPHIA — Since the weekend, Jimmy Rollins has been swinging like a different guy than the one who had been scuffling at the plate for much of August.

Rollins put a pitch from Washington’s Doug Fister over the right-field fence in the first-inning Wednesday. Even the night before, in going 0-for-3 with a walk in the Phillies’ 4-3 win over the Nationals, the contact was better. He flew out to the fence in left, hit a one-hop smash that happened to go directly to the third baseman, then hit a fly ball to the fence in right field in the eighth inning that moved Ben Revere from second to third and set up Carlos Ruiz’s game-winning sacrifice fly.

From Aug. 5-17, Rollins was hitting .173 (9-for-52) with one extra-base hit. He entered Wednesday’s homestand finale hitting .296 (8-for-27) with a double, home run and several other hard-hit balls, particularly from the right side of the plate, where his recent success against a glut of left-handed pitchers has pushed his switch-hitting splits closer to a healthy balance (a .714 OPS from the left side, .673 from the right).

When asked if there was anything to credit for his recent surge, Rollins showed a fairly grotesque, oval-shaped scar on the inside of his wrist, about an inch wide and a half-inch long.

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“Well,” Rollins said, “that has healed up.”

In the final game of the Phils’ last visit to Washington to open August, Rollins had swiped second base with a head-first slide. Unfortunately for him, he hadn’t put his sliding glove on his right hand, and the gravel in the dirt had torn his wrist open nastily.

“I started feeling good right before we got to D.C.,” said Rollins, who had seven homers and a .582 slugging percentage in his final 19 games of July. “Then I had (the lacerated wrist). It was like when you fell off your bike and skinned your knee — the skin was just gone. The location of it. It was right in the middle of my swing. It hurt like an S.O.B.

“So for two weeks I was getting in some really bad habits just to stay on the field. I couldn’t hold onto the bat with two hands when I came through my swing.”

Rollins had guaranteed his vesting option for 2015 a couple of weeks before the injury, so that had nothing to do with his playing through the issue.

“You can’t really go on the DL for (a scrape),” Rollins said, “but it was all the way down, and every throw, every swing, everything you do in baseball, it was there.”

Rollins had the wrist wrapped, but just the movements made the healing process slow. Finally, early in the homestand, the wound finally closed.

“Now I’m back to where I was when I was feeling good from both sides of the plate, actually,” Rollins said.

Even with the setback, Rollins is on pace for 21 homers and 35 stolen bases. If he reaches those numbers, he will become the second player in big-league history age 35 or over with a 20-homer, 30-steal season, Brady Anderson being the other.

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Ryne Sandberg mostly smiled through his pre-game press outing, even when asked if he thought he was losing his team.

“No,” Sandberg said. “I just deal with it and have conversations.”

Such recent little chats have come after disgruntlements expressed by the likes of Kyle Kendrick, Dom Brown and David Buchanan. Now, all three of them really have something to whine about, right?

Then came the most significant of such Sandberg chats, after a 4-3 Phillies victory at Citizens Bank Park, which saw Cole Hamels exit rather quickly after giving up a game-tying home run in the seventh inning. Hamels barely waited for Sandberg to arrive at the mound before bolting.

“I had a brief conversation with him,” Sandberg said. “He was upset with what had happened in the seventh inning and he was upset with the leadoff home run when he had a chance to go deep in that game. But he knew that he was in there for an at-bat, at-a-time ... situation. And the home run erased that possibility.”

In other words, Sandberg gave Hamels a chance to hang, and he couldn’t.

“I still gave him the chance with his pitch count to go out and try to get through the eighth,” Sandberg said. “He was upset about the home run. You know what, I gave him a verbal when I was about six feet from the grass: ‘Hey, we’re going to pick you up right here, Cole. Nice job.’

“So he thought that was the release to let him go. I just clarified that with him.”

Oh.

Asked if he felt he had a handle on the clubhouse, Sandberg said, “Yes.”

Then, in Chip Kelly clarification language, he added, “Yeah.”

Then Sandberg grinned again.

• • •

NOTES: There was a visitor in the Phillies clubhouse that is a Junior but isn’t connected with Taney Little League: John Mayberry Jr. “He’s getting checked out today,” Sandberg said. “He’ll go back for three more days to Lehigh Valley to continue getting games under his belt.” Mayberry could rejoin the Phillies in Atlanta Sept. 1. ... Sandberg was asked to speculate on whether he thought Cody Asche could switch positions, you know, in case some kid named Maikel Franco drops by soon. “Right now he’s the third baseman,” Sandberg said of Asche. “Until something would change, then I think that would be discussed. I think that he has the ability to play another position. I don’t know which one. With what he offers with the left-handed bat and being a young hitter, he has a very good arm. ... If that ever came to that I think it would be an opportunity.” ... Mike Adams pitched one inning in a rehab appearance at Lehigh Valley Tuesday night and Sandberg said he got through “clean.” Adams will likely do it again this weekend.